Trust Yourself: Leah Laabs Is Already Living the Advice She'd Give Every Vet Student
Before vet school, she was the one holding the leash in the room where families said goodbye. Now she's torn between two specialties she loves equally, and that's exactly the kind of problem she wants.
Some people discover their calling over time, through trial and error, through a class that unexpectedly clicks, through a slow accumulation of small signs. For Leah Laabs, veterinary medicine has never worked that way. It has always felt like home.
A DVM Candiate at St. George's University School of Veterinary Medicine, Leah Laabs didn't arrive at vet school the way many of her classmates did, fresh off an undergraduate degree with research experience and a letter of recommendation from a favorite professor. She arrived with years already logged on the floor of an emergency veterinary hospital, the kind of experience that doesn't show up cleanly on a transcript but reshapes how a person sees the entire profession.
The Room Where Everything Gets Real
Before she was a veterinary student, Laabs was an emergency veterinary technician, which means she spent years standing in the room where the best and worst moments of pet ownership happen, sometimes within the same hour. She watched veterinarians deliver impossible news with steady voices. She watched families fall apart and put themselves back together in waiting rooms. She watched what it actually takes, clinically and emotionally, to be the person someone needs in a crisis.
That experience didn't just point her toward veterinary school. It built the blueprint for the kind of veterinarian she's determined to become, one who treats advocacy not as a buzzword but as a job description.
“My mission is to use my experience, education, and compassion to advocate for those who cannot speak for themselves.”
Whether that means stabilizing a critical patient, walking a family through a devastating diagnosis, or helping an animal pass peacefully and without pain, Laabs wants to be the person people can lean on during their hardest moments. It is a mission that doesn't pause when she walks out of the clinic, because for Laabs, the role of veterinary student, wife, and mother all draw from the same well. There is no separate version of her that exists only in scrubs. The discipline, the compassion, and the refusal to give less than her best follow her everywhere, including home, where a demanding academic schedule has to coexist with the daily, unglamorous work of being present for a family.
She doesn't talk about that balancing act like it's remarkable. She talks about it like it's simply what the goal requires.
Built for Emergency Medicine. Maybe.
Ask Laabs what drew her to veterinary medicine in the first place, and the answer comes without hesitation.
“It never feels like something I have to force myself to do. Even when I'm exhausted, all I want to do is go help animals.”
For most of her journey, that pull led in one direction. Having lived inside emergency medicine as a technician, she assumed it would also define her career as a veterinarian. The pace fit her. The pressure fit her. The chance to change a patient's entire trajectory in the span of a single decision was, to her, the whole point of the profession.
Then a neurology course rearranged everything she thought she knew about her own future.
“What started as a class quickly became a passion. I found myself fascinated by lesion localization, problem-solving, and putting together pieces of a puzzle.”
It is, in some ways, an unlikely rival to emergency medicine. Where ER work rewards speed and instinct, neurology rewards patience and pattern recognition, slow detective work built one clue at a time. But for Laabs, both disciplines are pulling on the exact same instincts that brought her into veterinary medicine to begin with: the desire to act decisively when something is wrong, and the desire to understand precisely why.
Now she faces what she only half-jokingly calls her most agonizing career decision yet, choosing between two specialties she loves with equal intensity. It is, by any measure, a good problem to have, and she knows it.
“What makes this decision so difficult is that neither option feels wrong. Both challenge me, inspire me, and remind me why I wanted to become a veterinarian in the first place.”
Compassion, Curiosity, and Perseverance
Every veterinary professional eventually identifies the handful of traits that carried them across the finish line. For Laabs, three rise above the rest, and each one maps onto a distinct part of her story.
Compassion keeps her tethered to the reason she walked into this profession in the first place, the same instinct that made her good at her job long before she ever set foot in vet school. Perseverance is what gets her through the demanding realities of veterinary education while still showing up fully for her family and chasing a dream that has, at times, meant being far from home. And curiosity, the same curiosity that pulled her sideways into neurology, is what keeps her hungry to learn more, do better, and push the boundaries of what she can offer a patient or a family.
That same drive has evolved into something bigger than her own education. Mentorship has become a defining part of how Laabs moves through veterinary school. She makes time, even when time is the one resource she has the least of, to help fellow students navigate the hardest stretches of the program, sharing what she's learned the hard way and pushing her peers to believe in themselves with the same conviction she's had to build in herself.
Looking Toward the Future
Plenty of veterinary students keep their focus locked on graduation day, and understandably so. Laabs thinks several steps further out, toward the profession itself and the gaps she already sees waiting for her on the other side of her degree.
She is clear-eyed about one of veterinary medicine's most persistent challenges: how much remains unknown.
“There are still diseases and conditions where our treatment options are limited simply because we don't know enough yet. The patients we save tomorrow may only be possible because someone was willing to ask a question today.”
It's a mindset rooted in lifelong learning, one that will serve her regardless of which specialty ultimately wins out, or whether she finds a way to build a career that draws on both. Five years from now, she already has a clear picture of where she wants to be.
“I hope to be the veterinarian people run to when they are scared. Whether that means stabilizing a critical patient, helping an owner understand a diagnosis, or simply being there during a difficult decision, I want to make a meaningful difference every day.”
She also intends to keep mentoring veterinary students and new graduates well past her own time in school, paying forward the same guidance that helped carry her through it.
Advice for Future Veterinary Students
If Laabs could travel back and hand her pre-vet-school self exactly one piece of advice, it wouldn't be complicated, and it wouldn't be about study habits or application strategy.
Trust yourself.
“There will be moments when you question whether you belong. Remember that you earned your place here.”
She encourages students to lean into each other rather than retreat into competition, because the people sitting beside them in lecture halls aren't rivals. They're future colleagues, future collaborators on hard cases, and in many instances, lifelong friends.
“You will be challenged, humbled, and pushed outside of your comfort zone. But you will grow because of it.”
For a future veterinarian whose mission is built on advocacy, compassion, and an unwillingness to stop learning, that advice reads less like a pep talk and more like a roadmap she has already been following, long before she had the degree to back it up.
If Leah Laabs' journey so far is any indication, veterinary medicine has gained a future leader who is fully prepared to answer the call, whether that means the emergency room, the neurology service, or some version of the profession that doesn't fully exist yet, built by someone willing to ask the next question.
Leah Laabs is a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine Candidate at St. George's University School of Veterinary Medicine, and a member of the Vet Candy Rising Stars of 2026.